Little Red Rashômon is a great idea for a movie — telling the Red Riding Hood tale from the alternate views of Little Red (Anne Hathaway), Granny (Glenn Close), the Woodsman (James Belushi) and the Wolf (Patrick Warburton) (who feels he got a bad rap) — but this low-budget animation doesn’t have enough comedic smarts or sufficient visual ingenuity to quite make it work. In inception it’s cleverer than Shrek, taking the same storybooks-populated-by-ironic-Californians tack and marrying it to a better idea, yet it has neither the winning writing nor the appealing characters.
The voice cast give good sardonic delivery, but they’re working with dialogue that lacks the sophistication of most modern-day Saturday morning cartoons.
